What's your (Id AM) hurry?

Being the Type AAA personality that I am, I often wonder how perfectly healthy-looking young people can get on an escalator or an airport people-moved and just stand there while it takes them someplace. Don’t they want to move? Don’t they want to get where they’re going? They’ll probably enjoy sitting longer at their destination than standing longer watching people who are walking alongside the people mover pass them up. Don’t they have a purpose in life? Don’t they want to avoid getting elbowed by me and a whole lot of other people who push past them?

But when it’s time to build your IAM framework, you can’t hurry. Case in point: I recently met with a customer who told me that, as the starting point for an IAM review, their Big Four partner began a role mining exercise. That’s what they started with. Sorry, but that’s just stupid. The customer recognized this, too. If you develop roles, but have no place to put them, what’s the point? How about a review of business requirements? Onboarding and(maybe more importantly) off-boarding? What about looking at the processes? Roles serve those processes, not the other way around.

You need a plan. Don’t waste your time, money, and resources building something that doesn’t help the business. It really IS all about processes. How do I enable, secure, and audit the business? That’s how this works. Inventory those individual processes, inventory what you need to fulfill those requirements, then inventory the pieces you already have in place, and figure out the gaps. There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the 10,000-foot view.

Once you have all that written down, of course, THAT is when you go nuts, and elbow those damn people off your people mover on the way to your new IAM framework.